“When there was no Pepsi left for my rye whisky, nieces, there was always ginger ale. No ginger ale? Then I had river water. River water’s light like something between those two. And brown Moose River water’s cold. Cold like living between two colours. Like living in this town.When the whisky was Crown Royal, then brown Moose River water was a fine, fine mix.

You know I was a bush pilot. The best. But the best have to crash. And I’ve crashed a plane, me. Three times. I need to explain this all to you. I was a young man when I crashed the first time.The world was wide open. I was scared of nothing. Just before Helen and I had our oldest boy. The first time I crashed I was drunk, but that wasn’t the reason I crashed. I used to fly a bush plane better with a few drinks in me. I actually believe my eyesight improved with whisky goggles on. But sight had nothing to do with my first crash.Wait. It had everything to do with it. Snowstorm. Zero visibility. As snow blinded my takeoff from the slick runway, I got the goahead with a warning from the Moosonee flight tower: harder snow coming.

An hour later and I’d made it a hundred miles north of Moose River on my way to pick up trappers not wanting but needing to come in from their lines.A rush to find them with night coming. I had a feeling where they’d be.Me, I was a natural in a plane. But in snow? One minute I’m humming along, the next, my fuel line’s gummed and I’m skidding and banging against a frozen creek.The crazy thing? Had I come in a few feet to the left or right, blind like I did, I would have wrapped my plane around black spruce lining the banks. Head a mush on the steering. Broken legs burning on a red-hot motor.The grandparents sometimes watch out. Chi meegwetch, omoshomimawak!

My plane wasn’t too damaged, but this was a crash nonetheless. And I emerged from the first true brush with it. The long darkness. No need to speak its name out loud.

Soon as I forced the door open, the snow, it stopped falling. Like that. Like in a movie. And when the cloud cover left on a winter afternoon a hundred plus miles north of Moosonee in January, the cold came, presented itself in such a forceful way that I had two choices.

The first was to assume that the cold was a living thing that chased me and wanted to suck the life from me. I could get angry at it, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and then begin to panic.“

“We in the West are living in the midst of a jihad, and most of us don’t even realize it — because it’s a brand of jihad that’s barely a generation old.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War. It’s called the House of War because it, too, according to the Koran, is destined to be governed by sharia, and it will take war — holy war, jihad — to bring it into the House of Submission.

Jihad began with Muhammed himself. When he was born, the lands that today make up the Arab world were populated mostly by Christians and Jews; within a century after his death, those areas’ inhabitants had been killed, driven away, subjugated to Islam as members of the underclass known as dhimmis, or converted to the Religion of Peace at the point of a sword. The Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not wars of conquest by Europeans but attempts to take back what had once been Christian territory. America’s very first foreign conflict after the Revolutionary War was with the Barbary pirates, who, sponsored by the Muslim governments of North Africa — just as terrorist groups today enjoy the sponsorship of countries like Libya, Iran, and Syria — had for generations been preying on European ships and selling their crews and passengers into slavery. (Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, over one million Europeans — including people like Cervantes, Saint Vincent de Paul, and French playwright Jean Francois Regnard — became chattel in North Africa, a minor detail that rarely makes it into Western history textbooks, perhaps because it would compel textbook writers to accord jihad a major role in their narratives of Western history.)

In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassadors to Britain and France respectively, met in London with the Tripolitanian envoy to Britain and asked him why his pirates were preying on American ships; he explained, as Adams and Jefferson reported afterward to the Continental Congress, that the pirates’ actions were “founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

„It was the last thing he needed or wanted, a dead ape at the end of his shift, but there it was—a corpse with bad timing. Larry Gibson, one of the night security guards at Primate Park, stood staring at the thing spotlighted in his torch beam—a long-stemmed cruciform of black fur lying less than twenty feet away, face up and palms open on the grassy verge in front of the wire. He didn’t know which of the fifteen species of monkey advertised in the zoo’s product literature this one was, and he didn’t care; all he knew was that he had some decisions to make and fast. He weighed up what to do with how much he could get away with not doing: he could sound the alarm and stick around to help when and where and if he was needed; or he could simply look the other way and ignore King Kong for the ten remaining minutes of his shift. Plus he craved sleep. Thanks to some Marine-issue bennies he’d popped on Sunday night, he’d been awake for fifty-nine hours straight; his longest ever stretch. The most he’d lasted before was forty-eight hours. It was now Wednesday morning. He’d run out of pills and all the sleep he’d cheated and skipped out on was catching up with him, ganging up in the wings, getting ready to drop on him like a sack of wet cement.

He checked his watch. 5.21 A.M. He needed to get out of here, get home, get his head down, sleep. He had another job starting at one p.m. as a supermarket supervisor. That was for alimony and child support. This gig—cash in hand and no questions asked—was for body and soul and the roof over his head. He really couldn’t afford to fuck it up.

Dr Jenny Gold had been dozing with the radio on when she got the phone call from the security guard in Sector i, nearest the front gate. Something about a dead gorilla, he’d said. She hoped to God it wasn’t Bruce, their star attraction.“

“We’re standing there drop-dead gorgeous in the metro. I’ve got on this skintight T-shirt and shorts that end before they’ve hardly begun. Volkova’s in a long sky-blue dress that shows everybody her boobs and her backside, everything big and bouncy. Her light brown hair’s all carefully styled and lacquered — “Not like you: Rake it across the bald patch and off you go.” A big nose. It doesn’t spoil her though. It gives her individuality. All the men starehard when she walks past. And when we’re together, it’s like the end of the world.

There we are standing opposite the escalator, with people riding up and out in our direction. All sorts.

“Look at that one; what an ugly kisser!”

“He’s looking in our direction! Yuh-uck!”

“Anyone but that one, anyone but that one!”

“Oh, sugar…no, don’t come this way!”

“No, not that freak, please!”

So we’re standing there whispering, and in the end we wound ourselves up so much we almost legged it top-speed out of the metro. But for some reason we hung on. Then suddenly I see two boys coming toward us. The one who’s not so tasty is like a Soviet soft toy dog. The other’s Pepsi, pager, MTV, spiky hair, fruit-drop lips, really cocky look. Gorgeous like a picture in a magazine.

“Which of you is my husband?” I asked in a voice hoarse with excitement, while Volkova digested the information. “No need to run; the beauty contest’s come to you.”

“Me,” the gorgeous one answered modestly. “I’m Lyapa. And this is Kres.”

Kres shook his long hair and smiled in a village-yokelish kind of way. Round-faced and round-bellied. Lyapa beamed.

And now here I am sitting in his kitchen, and he’s smoking and not showing the slightest sign of interest. He’s two years younger than me.

I downed my coffee decisively, burnt my tongue, got up and made for the door.

“Where are you going?” Lyapa said, rousing himself.

“Home!”

“It’s nighttime. You can’t go out there.”

“So what do I do?”

Lyapa started thinking. Maybe he’d overdone it back then on the Net, when he showered me with messages: “My pussycat! I love you very, very much!” Maybe he shouldn’t have. It’s two months now since that meeting in the metro. We see each other once a week. I’ve been with Volkova to watch his band rehearse a couple of times. I remember the guitarist Vitya sang a line instead of Kres, and Kres was really upset and took offense, because he’s the vocalist, not Vitya. He was humiliated in front of Volkova and me. He was left with nothing to do. As if heweren’t the vocalist at all, just some piece of gear that could easily be replaced. Take Lyapa: I don’t think you could replace him; no one else plays the drums like that. But Kres…Like, who cares?”

In The Beginning Man Tried Ascending To Heaven via The Tower Of Babel. Now He Tries To Elevate His Existence Using Hallucinogenic Drugs. And, Since The 20th Century, He Continually Voyages Into Outer Space Using Spacecrafts. Prayer Thru Christ Is The Only Way To Reach Heaven.